Nadhim Zahawi: speedy deals and talented scientists were the secret to UK vaccine success

The unprecedented pace at which deals were struck to secure Covid vaccines was a crucial reason for the success of the UK’s rollout, Nadhim Zahawi, the minister for Covid-19 Vaccine Deployment, has said. According to Zahawi, thanks to the actions of the Vaccine Taskforce, headed by Kate Bingham, “we were the first nation in the world to engage with BioNtech, before they’d even made the deal [to collaborate] with Pfizer.”

The government invested in manufacturing capacity for vaccines early, before it was known which candidates would bear fruit. This was a risk, Zahawi said, but one which the country was able to take because of the calibre of its scientific community: “One thing we are blessed with in the UK is our life science ecosystem.”

In a wide-ranging conversation with Reaction editor Iain Martin (you can watch the full event on YouTube), Zahawi also admitted that the UK lacked manufacturing capacity before the pandemic; thanks to globalisation, “a lot of medicine manufacturing has moved offshore”. But the Vaccine Taskforce acted quickly to build capacity. Long-term, Zahawi believes the site built in Scotland for the Valneva vaccine could prove especially useful. The design of this vaccine indicates that it could have “really good prospects at continuing to be effective against the virus.” It may well be one of the candidates for our future annual vaccination programme.

The silver lining to the pandemic for Zahawi, is that the UK is starting to be seen as a very attractive place for big pharma to base itself for manufacturing. In addition to a newfound ability to manufacture, the country has a stellar reputation for science research, a respected medical regulator and, crucially, an extremely impressive genomic surveillance capacity: the UK currently conducts around 50 per cent of all the genomic sequencing in the world.

These strengths persuaded CureVac, a German biopharma company, to form a partnership with the UK earlier this month. CureVac is working on a tweaked vaccine to tackle variants which will be manufactured on British soil. In addition to creating a Covid vaccine, the firm is also working on a future cancer vaccine. “Out of adversity we have spawned lots of great innovation,” said Zahawi.